


the shadows of her ghosts

by shivermetimbers



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: After the Happy Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, Healing, Multi, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-15 22:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10558742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shivermetimbers/pseuds/shivermetimbers
Summary: Leia had lost too many people.





	

Leia had lost too many people. In quiet moments the weight of their shadows dragged at her bones, crowded the back of her consciousness with echoes of past happiness.

Her planet, exploding. 

Obi-Wan being cut down by Vader, the last Jedi extinguished.

Lando raising his head from the carbonite controls, his face bleak.

Someday she would have the emotional strength to think about her ghosts, to bring them out into the light and let herself smile again at her brighter memories. Their deaths were not the only thing about them. Their deaths were not the only thing she should remember.

For now, she walled up that part of herself, became sharply brittle. The little girl who ran laughing through the fragrant gardens of Alderaan was as gone as those same gardens; Leia was a fighter now, hard and tough and ruthless. There was no space for laughter in her world.

“Relax,” Lando said in bed, his gentle fingers working at the unyielding knots in her shoulders. “Live in the moment, sweetheart.”

Leia was nobody’s sweetheart. “Just because I want a fuck doesn’t mean I need life advice.”

Lando was silent, his hands still moving. They had become close in the months since Cloud City, as close as Leia allowed anyone to get to her in those days. Lando probably thought they were closer than they were. And yet there was still no question of him snarking back, of easy banter and flashes of wit, of an ongoing fight that was really a pursuit. 

He kissed her shoulder, wordless apology. She closed her eyes and twisted in his grasp, pressing their mouths together, pushing him down on the bed.

She had no room for softness, because brittleness could break.

~

She shouldn’t have fucked Luke. Not because of what she learned later – the last ironic twist of the galaxy to screw with their cursed family – but because of the stars in his eyes. At least Lando knew the score. For all his Jedi mystery, Luke was still a tousled-hair Outer Rim kid who believed in things like love and hope and the future.

But Lando was on a mission, and Luke was there, and she felt a strange pull to him. Attraction and something else, knotty and complex, and she kissed him, and he kissed back. Sometimes it was as simple as that, finding the eye of the storm for a few short hours.

“After it’s over,” Luke said, his head pillowed on her stomach, “we can find somewhere quiet.”

He knew Leia struggled with her fame. He had seen the way she settled her public face in the mornings, steeling her spine to become the avatar of a movement, the bright star of the Rebellion. He could feel how she held her body, straight and tense, ready for the next blow the universe might throw at her.

But Luke didn’t hear the ghosts.

“I’ll take you far away from everything,” he said, the clear tenor of his voice confident and sure. “We can find a nice planet without any Hutts or deserts or soldiers, quiet, out of the way. You won’t have to give speeches. I’ll plant a garden. Our kids won’t ever have to see a Stormtrooper.”

The confidence in his voice had turned a little tentative by the end. Hopeful. They hadn’t talked about kids before. 

Leia’s stomach clenched. She would bear no children. The universe had enough hostages.

“The Empire won’t fall in a day,” she said.

She should tell him that she had no faith that she would ever spend a single day outside the fight against the Empire, that she fully expected to die before it fell. She should tell him that insurgencies were almost always doomed, that all the pluck and gumption in the world couldn’t match the never-ending supply of Stormtroopers. She should tell him about the intelligence reports on her desk, the ones that said the Empire was building another Death Star.

But something in her stayed her hand. There had been enough deaths. She couldn’t kill Luke’s hope too. Not today.

“Not in a day,” Luke agreed. “But after. Then we’ll have our quiet planet.”

Leia pushed his head downwards, hearing the playfulness in his laugh, and didn’t answer.

~

The day her life would end, she fought like a woman possessed. Far above her, Lando was ready for his final battle, one last chance to stay alive and destroy the second Death Star. Leia had no hope for herself, not down here with a skeleton crew on a planet full of Stormtroopers. But she could sell her life dear, and that was all she wanted, these days.

She spared a grudging grateful thought for the universe, that it was letting her die with Luke and Chewie by her side. She would not die alone.

In the heat of the battle, it seemed to her almost as if her ghosts fought by her side. She could hear her father’s laughter and her mother’s shout over the whine of blaster shot, and she felt that if she turned, she would see Han behind her, protecting her back. She knew it was only Chewie, only Luke; and yet she smiled, grim and bleak, and saw it reflected in the eyes of a Stormtrooper she killed.

Leia was not a safe person, these days.

Perhaps it was best that it ended here. She was so tired. No more ghosts, no more walls, no more iron armor protecting her from the tidal waves of grief that tried to break on her shore. No more not-thinking about her memories, no more keeping even her friends and lovers at arms-length, refusing to take comfort for fear of breaking.

Just rest, and peace.

When the battle ended and Leia did not – when she leaned against Chewie and watched the Death Star explode in the sky – when she felt deep in her soul that Luke was alive – she felt almost cheated. 

One last twist of the universe. She had never contemplated surviving. She was a fighter, not a survivor. She had no idea how to go forward.

She turned her face into Chewie’s chest, and he held her. 

Perhaps he was the only one of her friends who might truly understand.

~

Leia gave the benediction to the honored dead at the official celebration ceremony, then stood regal and outwardly joyful for the rest of the night, bestowing medals and smiles on all and sundry. She was on camera, transmitted to an astonished universe and recorded for posterity. She had no time for private sorrow.

Afterwards, she considered getting royally drunk, but her stomach was already unsettled. She found Lando and Luke and took them to bed instead. There was more than one way to find oblivion.

Neither of them said anything trite about it being over now. Somewhere along the way – whether through coming to know her, or through their own experiences – they must have learned the truth that Leia had carried since Alderaan, written on her bones: it was never over.

Or perhaps they sensed the grief in her, finally beginning to crack through her iron defenses, and their forbearance was simple kindness.

Leia watched them kiss, kneeling above her on the bed. Luke was older now, not just in years. Lando looked the same as ever, but she knew that suave exterior concealed depths; his hands held Luke’s forearms as if they would never let him go. 

They broke apart and looked at her. She must have made a sound.

She reached for them, and they dropped down beside her.

Lando kissed her, and Luke’s arms went around her, holding her close. 

~

Leia didn’t know what the future held for her. She was a child of war, brought up by her mother’s friends to be her father’s nemesis. Her ghosts were a part of her, waking in her long nights, haunting her with the memory of happiness. How could she try to find happiness again, knowing how quickly it could be turned into unspeakable pain? 

But night after night, as the messy joyousness of freedom played out across the Empire, as they fought cleanup battles and destroyed leftover Stormtrooper squadrons and escaped rogue assassins, as they began to shape the future of the galaxy, she had Luke and Lando at her side, quiet and sure. 

She never asked them for anything except their company and their bodies. If they had given her their hearts – had, perhaps, given them long ago – she had not asked for them. They were rash indeed, to risk their hearts in this galaxy.

Leia was not that rash.

~

Six months after Endor, Lando bought them an island.

It was a little island, with a cozy house on a hill and a cottage garden and a chicken coop. Everything was green, and slightly overgrown, and the sand on the beach below the hill looked white and pillowy. 

Leia stood on the path to the house, staring at it.

“You don’t have to stay,” Luke said. 

None of them could _stay_ stay. They couldn’t retire to anonymous peace. There was an Empire to rescue, a bureaucracy to reinvent, a galaxy to lead, Force-users to find. Leia had a Senate to reinvent as a deliberative body, Lando had a military-industrial complex to dismantle, Luke had an Order to revive. (And they all had to stay alive, despite being marked for death by a hundred bounty-hunters and assassins and ex-Imperials.) It was never over.

But Luke didn’t mean that. He knew that reality as well as she did.

Leia looked at him, standing firm and solid on the path, and at Lando behind him, his face clear and sure.

“We love you,” Lando said. “But we won’t ask for something you can’t give us.”

They knew her fears. They knew her nightmares. They knew the way she woke, gasping with the grief she would not speak.

“I won’t give the universe more power to hurt me,” she said, the words grating against her teeth.

Luke’s eyes were sad. She remembered that he had lost his parents too; whatever the actual biology of the matter, his aunt and uncle had been as much his parents as Bail and Breha had been hers. He had lost them, and found their burnt corpses in the wreckage of his home. She was not the only person with ghosts.

“That’s what makes us human,” Lando said, softly.

Human. Leia hardly felt human anymore. Not since Alderaan, not since Cloud City, not when every battle meant more losses. How soon would she forget the sound of an Alderaanian accent? How soon would she forget the faces of the people she had loved?

She remembered her mother, who had somehow kept smiling, even though her husband and daughter had been walking in the very belly of the beast. Her mother, who had sent Vader’s daughter into the Emperor’s presence, and however much she might have been afraid, had loved her just as fiercely, despite her daily peril. Her mother, who had not been reluctant to let herself fully love; her mother, who had taken Vader’s daughter into her heart knowing who she was and knowing she would be afraid for her every day of her life.

Leia had spent so long being strong, that she wasn’t sure if she was strong enough to stop.

“I’m broken,” she said, barely more than a whisper.

“So am I,” Luke said, and took her hands. “So is Lando. War breaks us all.”

She looked past him to the house. It was really a very little house. Nothing compared to the palace she’d grown up in. There were yellow curtains in the windows, and what looked like an apple tree in the front garden. The sun glinted off the roof tiles and into her eyes, making it blur.

She remembered her father, and the last time he had held her close. 

“Well,” she said, and wet her lips. “Maybe three broken pieces can make one tattered whole.”

~

The fight was still never over, and her work would still never be through. The universe still had the power to destroy her, and the shadows of her ghosts would never fully lift from her shoulders.

But Luke was growing tomatoes in the garden, and there were Alderaanian flowers growing in their windowbox (thanks to an Alderaanian gardener living on Naboo who Lando found). They didn't get as much time together as they would have liked, but wherever they were in the galaxy, Leia could feel the love surrounding her. It was as tangible as her pain, as solid as the warmth of their fireplace, and as bright as the light in her lovers’ eyes.

Perhaps the pain would never leave her. Yet Leia chose to love nonetheless; she considered it the bravest and most reckless choice of her life, and she made it anew every morning.

She looked into the dawn sky, and smiled.


End file.
